Works on Paper: Experiments in Language and Sound is a series of performances, installations, readings, lectures, and walks.
All events occur at Passages Bookshop located at 1801 NW Upshur Street, Suite 660, Portland, Oregon.
Suggested donation $10 – $20; no one turned away for a lack of funds.
Neal Kosaly-Meyer
11 March 2023
6:00 p.m. – lecture
7:30 p.m. – performance
Neal Kosaly-Meyer gives a performance of A Finnegans Wake Project. The project, now in its eleventh year, is Kosaly-Meyer's effort to learn and perform, from memory, and with acute attention to musical detail, each of the seventeen episodes of James Joyce's final novel Finnegans Wake. Thus far, Kosaly-Meyer has performed all eight episodes of Finnegans Wake Part I, and the first episode of Part II. For this performance, Kosaly-Meyer will present Finnegans Wake, Part II, Chapter 1 (the ninth chapter), in its entirety, preceded by a short introductory lecture and a moderated discussion.
Gust Burns | dana jnnfrsn
18 March 2023
7:30 p.m.
Gust Burns's on hearing jimi comprises a series of musical excerpts performed on turntable alongside a series of spoken texts. Burns elucidates how the work's seemingly simple process results in a "recursive, multi-modal interweaving of subject and object, active affection and passive affectability, the performance presents a preliminary exploration of hearing and listening that positions practices/conditions of aurality within a larger political-ontological framework." Performed by Gust Burns and Zoë Verlaak.
dana jnnfrsn present a medley of improvicompositional pieces involving timers, tools, scrap metal, bricks, a bucket or two, and any number of keyboards.
David Abel | Susan Gevirtz
15 April 2023
7:30 p.m.
Susan Gevirtz will realize a solo performance of her play Motion Picture Home. Named after the actual Motion Picture Home for retired stars and workers of the Hollywood movie industry in Los Angeles, it addresses the death there of Gevirtz’s grandfather, and other deaths and schisms such as divorce, wish, and liaisons between dream and film. It is primarily performed off stage by live humans and recorded “voiceover" soundtracks.
David Abel presents a new performance work involving reading and live transmission.
Robert Blatt
21 April 2023
7:30 p.m.
Robert Blatt organizes a performance of How to Read a Book, a new collection of text scores by the artist exploring experimental approaches to reading. At times working collectively and at other times dispersed in independent activities, the performance draws entirely from the books found at Passages Bookshop as material to realize an assemblage of scores from the project as interwoven activities engaging language, sound, transcription, projection, and movement.
Performed by Robert Blatt, John Dombroski, Caspar Sonnet, and James Yeary.
Mark So
6 May 2023
4:00 p.m. – 10 p.m. (come and go as you wish)
Mark So presents an evening of tapes, readings, and text-objects from his Ashbery series and ongoing work with composer Manfred Werder. A six-hour multichannel playback of So’s taped through-reading of John Ashbery's FLOW CHART provides a scrim for nuclei of his work to appear and coincide: a group of his Ashbery scores which composer Manfred Werder performed for a month at a time, marked by his sparse overtyping and occasional polaroids; several typescripts from late in the Ashbery series, no longer scores but radical transcriptions of entire poems; and readings 54, for Manfred (2016 – ), an ongoing reading/writing/recording process comprising both a text-from-reading compiled in notebooks and a c20 tape loop. So describes the program as "neither performance nor exhibition, but a mutually complicating interspersion of broken/modular facets."
Mike Richard
12 May 2023
7:30 p.m
Mike Richard's Adventures in Speculative Pragmatism is an over two-hour long composition based on Brian Massumi's Extreme Realism: in Sixteen Series. The work is performed by Richard on keyboard and gong while speaking-singing Massumi's text and includes Robert Blatt and Mark So on electric organ and synthesizers. The score is presented as a projection of Massumi's text, and the entire performance occurs alongside recordings derived from electronic and natural sources. Richard considers the work a proposal for "new ways of reading and listening, inclusive of Felix Guattari's concept of the 'three ecologies' which combine the mental, social, and environmental ecologies with further concepts found in Massumi's speculatively pragmatic oriented philosophies mixing a feedbacking-feedforwarding, thinking-feeling intuitive process as, through, and beyond notions of event and experience..."
Maledetto (1967–68) by Kenneth Gaburo
performed by Evergreen Experimental Music Ensemble
20 May 2023
7:30 p.m.
Kenneth Gaburo's Maledetto, a landmark work of experimental music from the composer's LINGUA project, exemplifies Gaburo's so-called practice of Compositional Linguistics (i.e., language as music, and music as language). Arun Chandra, who has led multiple performances of the work over the years and serves as musical director for the Evergreen Experimental Music Ensemble, provides the following analysis:
Maledetto: for Seven Virtuoso Voices by Kenneth Gaburo (1926-1993) is a 1-hour 'opera' for seven individual voices that interact with one another in quartets, quintets, duos, solos, and trios—in brief, it’s an orgy for voices.
It delivers a deep resistance to rationality, while proposing a path to a different way of speaking. The word 'screw' is taken for a ride, with all its potential meanings and (powerful) subtleties. The tongues of the seven performers lick you through sound. The rationality of speech is delivered through the sensuality of sounds, and sounds carry with them the irrational rationality of meaning. At all moments, the listener is assaulted by either the words or the phonemes—the decision is left up to the listener which one to follow now.
Gaburo has created an acoustic ocean, in which meaning and phonemes rub against one another, leading to a 'climax' that promises—something else. Something away from the insistence of the rational or the seduction of the sensual. No promises are given, but a door is pointed at.
Thus, Maledetto is a composition, a work of art, positing a path to the still not yet realized.
Performed by Ben Michaelis (Speaker A); Ben Kapp (Speaker B); Shannon Kerrigan, Allen Burgess, Arun Chandra, and Callum McKean (Speaker C); and Emma Jones (Speaker D).
Nico Vassilakis | mARKO WHENs
26 May 2023
7:30 p.m.
An evening of language events featuring performances by Nico Vassilakis and mARKO WHENs: Vassilakis has prepared SPEAKING through LETTERS and relatable oddities, a collection of readings, actions, scores and mores. mARKO WHENs is turning the bookshop into a scrolling poem as an open, collective performance environment.
Manfred Werder
3 June 2023
2:00 p.m. - dérive (walk)
7:30 p.m. - performance
Manfred Werder brings two interconnected activities, an outdoor dérive and an indoor performance, that continue the artist's practice of inscription. This includes the ongoing writing projects 20160 (three 22 meter long scrolls), 20170 (stack of found paper), 20190 (historic postcards), and the [ the music of history ]—described as "the inscription of the earth, that is, both the earth that inscribes and the earth that is inscribed." We will meet at the bookshop for the dérive. Upon returning to the bookshop, we will pause for a break, after which Werder will conclude with the performance.
Works on Paper supports activities that use concepts, characteristics, and histories of the book, and entanglements with text, as a frame for exploratory practice across the arts. This spring 2023 series, Experiments in Language and Sound, is organized by David Abel and Robert Blatt.
Works on Paper: Experiments in Language and Sound is funded in part by the Regional Arts & Culture Council and with support from the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.
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